First Snow Day of 2011!!

Well, I have just learned that we are now officially out of school again tomorrow, so that will be Snow Day #2. Not sure if I will have to work tomorrow or not. I will wait and see what the roads look like in the morning.

We had the official word of school closing today last night before bedtime. We stayed up a little late watching a movie. It was really nice to see the snow falling and building up and anticipating the fun we would be able to have today!! We did not get to sleep in too late. JC was awake around 7am and we soon had to get up for him. We made breakfast and got dressed for some fun in th snow! We ended up getting out the beach toys for them to play with in the snow. We figured that was the way the rednecks play in the snow anyway! They had fun making snow castles and shoveling the now around!

Wonderful, restful, weekend!

This has been a wonderfully lazy weekend to follow two incredibly busy holiday weekends!

Jim went to church for Men's Breakfast this morning, so we still had to get up and get going, but not nearly as early as usual. I took my shower before he left but just spent the morning in my pjs after that. I got the boys breakfast ready and started some laundry. Just a little bit of around the house chores. I spent the afternoon out with my best friend. We went to lunch and got pedicures. This was my birthday gift from her.

So while Jim was gone this morning I played with the camera just a bit...

JC got his new favorite toy, the laundry basket, out for a bit.

Then he decided to pose for a picture or two!

Drew wanted to play with his new sticker book. JC had to be right there with him for that! They love sitting at the new table/desk area in the kitchen.

After a while I had to go put on my makeup and fix my hair. It was getting close to time for me to leave and Jim was still not home. I took JC with me to the bathroom and he decided to occupy himself with my drawer of lotions and body sprays...

He had them all laid out like this on his own. This picture was actually taken after Jim got home. He jabbered to Jim all about them, as if he was giving a sales pitch on all these products!

He especially liked demonstrating how the caps can be taken off and put back on the body spray bottles!!

Dinner tonight was a pot roast with carrots and potatoes all cooked in the crock pot. It was awesome and I only had one dish to clean up! We are getting ready now to watch the Family Movie Night movie that is coming on tonight. I am excited about it. The preview of the movie looks really good and it is supposed to have only family friendly commercials and not as many commercials as normally during a tv movie, we will see!

Happy weekend everybody! If you are in the North MS area you are probably hearing the tales of the winter storm coming our way. We are not wishing for it but if we get snow I just want it to be enough for the kids to play in. If we get that kind of snow there will be much more blogging to come with snow pics! Okay, maybe I am wishing for it just a little!!

Awesome A's

Today Drew got his report card for the second 9 weeks of school and the first semester. He got all A's for both!! We are so proud of him.

He works really hard each week on his homework and definitely deserved good grades. He was so excited. His ribbon says Principal's List. He got one for the first 9 weeks also. I am not quite sure how we will reward him for his hard work yet. We have a project we are working on for his birthday and may try to purchase that item early as a reward for the good grades, we will see.

JC got a special surprise today too! For Christmas Memaw had gotten him a big teddy bear, which he loved from the moment he opened it. I never expected him to get so excited about a stuffed animal but he just loved the thing. He laid on the floor with it and played with it the entire time we were opening presents at her house on Christmas Eve. Well the bear had a problem, hair loss! I mean excessive hair loss! There was bear fuzz all over Memaw's house that day and when we got the bear home it was not any better. So, of course, she wanted us to return the bear and try to get him another one. My sister-in-law actually found another bear that was similar at another store the week after Christmas. We have not seen them since then though to get it. She is a teacher at Drew's school also. So today when Drew's assistant teacher was walking him to the car I noticed she was toting a huge bear. After a few moments it dawned on me that this was THE bear! JC was very excited about it again! He did not really seem to miss the other bear but was very excited to see the new one. So I took several pictures of him with it tonight for Memaw to see!
Here is the new bear...

Here is JC with the orginal bear on Christmas Eve...

Neither of these pics are that great, but you can see how excited he was about that bear!

JC with the new bear...

THANK YOU MEMAW AND AUNT REBECCA FOR TAKING CARE OF THE BEAR SITUTATION!!

Here is a video of the boys from tonight. The are being a couple of typical, rough and rowdy boys!

A New Beginning

Today was the beginning of some new things. Drew began the second semester of his 1st grade year. JC began staying at my sister's house rather than the daycare. This means that we have to get going extra early in the morning. I am very happy to say that today was incredibly successful! I got up at 4am, yes you read that correctly. I exercised and got ready to go even before our goal time of 6:30am. We probably were pulling out of the driveway at that time exactly. The kids did really good. Drew was tired but I think that was mostly due to staying up a little bit too late last night and that he has been out of routine for 2 weeks now. We arrived at Elizabeth's house by 6:50am. This was great because I had built in 30 minutes to get to her house and it really only took 20! I even had time to run in for a bathroom stop. Which is very important since I had already had 32oz of water during my workout and was working on an additional 24oz on the ride to work! JC was so sweet when I dropped him off. He knew where we were as soon as we pulled up and got pretty excited, but then he realized Drew was not getting out of the car too and seemed a bit apprehensive. As we headed into the house he seemed to realize what was going to happen. After my bathroom stop I came back to the kitchen and knelt down for him to hug me. He gave me a big love and then headed toward the pantry with Elizabeth in order to pick out his breakfast food. You know JC is always good with being left if food is being offered! Once he was settled Drew and I headed on down to Hernando. I actually got him dropped off at school and drove into the parking lot at work at 7:16am. I was really pumped at how well we had done. I only hope we can keep up this momentum! Obviously, since our mornings start so early bedtime has to be early. As I type JC is already down for the night and Drew is reluctantly heading to bed himself. He is resisting right now which is likely to end badly for him! Why do they always have to learn the hard way?!? Jim and I are planning to spend a little time reading and then we will be off to bed soon ourselves. We rarely ever turn the tv on during the week anymore. I really like it this way. It is quieter around the house and although we do miss a lot of the news and sometimes haven't a clue what is going on in the world, we don't really feel like we are missing anything.

Since my last post we have pretty much been letting JC feed himself with a spoon every night. He makes a big mess but I usually have clean up duty while Jim totes him straight to the bathroom. It has mostly been in the chair and on the table. He has not been to bad about getting things on the floor. I really am impressed with how well he uses the spoon. I think we probably helped Drew for longer than necessary. Also, Drew has always been the type that does not want his hands messy so he never would really just feed himself with his hands. JC has none of those inhibitions! It is wonderful that he is so independent but it also is reminding me of how he is quickly moving out of the baby stage of life.

Well I better run for now. We have both kids in bed and I am ready to have an evening cup of coffee and do some reading. Bye for now!

A little bit messy!

Last night we had a good old fashioned dinner! Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, and rolls! For my meat and tater lovin boys that was a might tasty meal! We decided to just let JC have the spoon and attempt the potatoes on his own. He knows how to eat with spoons and forks, really! I just have chosen up to now to not do this at home for the obvious reason that he will make a huge mess that I then have to clean up! They often gave them foods at the daycare that they would have to use utensils to eat. They also would strip them down to their diapers! Not a bad idea I think. He really did quite well with it though and I must say that he does better with the spoon at his age now then Drew did at that age.

Check out the evidence of some good eatin!

Make sure you look closely at the mash potato on his forehead!


Of course Drew (always the ham, never the humble!) wanted to get his picture taken as well. Daddy decided to be funny and give him bunny ears. But they are crooked bunny ears, which makes him look even sillier, if that is possible!


He had potato everywhere! Even under the table!


We are looking forward to a great holiday weekend! We are having some friends over tomorrow night to bring in the New Year. Hopefully the weather won't be too stormy as they are predicting it to be. I am sure there will be more pics and stories to come after another weekend of celebrating!

Morning Worship

I often get a little testy when Jim gets to stay home from work and I have to go, like right now while he is still on Christmas break. It is a bummer to have to get up earlier than everyone else and leave before my boys even get up. But on the positive side of this I love those days of driving to work alone. I have about a 30 minute drive and when I am alone like this it most often is a time of personal worship through song. This week I bought Chris Tomlin's newest cd, And If Our God Is For Us. I have loved all of his cds and this one is no different! So, this morning as I was driving and listening to the words of the songs and singing along where I had already picked up the lyrics I found myself deeply moved by one song on the album, All To Us. The entire song is awesome but particularly the end when he sings about seeing Jesus face to face and worshipping Him forever just brought chill bumps all over me! I found myself suddenly imagining what it would be like to be in the presence of my Lord and Savior, Jesus, and to be worshipping Him through song! It was an awesome feeling and thought. I hope that you have that same hope of eternity with Christ. If you don't all you need to do is call on His name to save you.

Here is a video of the song. It is just beautiful pics and the lyrics on the screen. It is a long song but I urge you to watch it all the way through and really focus on the words of the song. I hope it blesses your day just as it did mine!

Some changes at the Mayo house!

We have been very blessed through the years to have many pieces of furniture that were given to us from other family members who no longer needed them. We even have some pieces that were once in Jim's grandparents home that his grandfather made. We also have many items that my step-dad has made. I love having all this furniture that really means something to us. Over the years we have slowly replaced the items that were no longer in really usable shape. We have bought a bed and a couch and have been talking about a dining room table for several years. We have had two tables that my sister gave us to use as they got newer ones. While we appreciate this the last table we got from her is crazy ridiculous! It was driving us nuts!! We were on the verge of going furniture shopping and trying to buy something on 6 mon same as cash and pay it off with our income tax return. We are also planning some big moves with the boys over Spring Break. We have a bunk bed in storage at my sisters that we plan to put in Drew's room and have the boys share that room to sleep in and keep there clothing in and make JC's room the play room. Up to now JC's toys have just been in the dining room and living room, which was nice for keeping an eye on him but meant that toys were scattered all over the living room ALL the time! So I have been kinda anxious to move that stuff too. We have had a day bed set up in JC's room that we had even before we were expecting him, again a hand me down. It used to be where we would put Jim's mom to sleep when she would come up but now that JC is in there that does not really work, so she just sleeps in Drew's bed and he sleeps on the couch. So in the play room we had planned to put the tv from our bedroom and buy us a new one for our room. Well Saturday night the tv in our room just died! It was somewhat frustrating but we just let it go that night since we were planning for the baptism the next day and did not want to let something so silly get our spirits down.

Well, that pretty much gives you all the back ground info, now to get down to the nitty gritty of the story! The couple my mom works for is moving into a much smaller place and as a result are getting rid of a lot of stuff. So I told my mom if they had a table they were not needing anymore I would be interested. So mom called me on Sunday afternoon to tell me that they had a table that we could have and that she was there with my dad and uncle and could load it up and bring it to us. Well I was excited! I did not really care what it looked like, I just wanted the other one out of there!! A few minutes later she calls me again to tell me that she also had a tv that we could have. Well now I was just giddy! So they roll up to our house and unload the table, which I thought looked great! And a 27inch tv! Now mind you that the tv that had died the night before was 13inch! So now we not only have a tv in our room but we can actually see it! And we now have a great table in our dining room that is perfect for us and we were able to put the old table in the kitchen and create a little work/homework space and it will still work great for Drew to eat breakfast at in the mornings. I have pictures below to share with you!

The new dining room set up...


Our hutch was in our kitchen but now in the dining room...


The items on the hutch are new additions as well. The tile with our initial on it and the verse was a gift for Christmas from my parents. The karosene lamp and the dove candle stick were items from the home of Jim's great aunt and uncle. His aunt passed away several years ago but his uncle just recently passed away. Their son sent several boxes of items from their home for us to look through and disperse between us. When were were at my mother-in-law's for Christmas we went through them and these are two of the items we brought home.


These baseball gloves were also part of the items we brought home from his aunt and uncle. Jim's grandfather actually cut the patterns for the gloves to be made. I am not really sure how we are going to display them just yet. We got 3 so there would be one for Jim and then each of our boys.


Here is the new kitchen set up. We have all the computer equipment sitting on here as well as the stuff we need for homework time. The little cabinet next to the table is where we keep all the crayons, marker, paper, and coloring books that Drew uses and eventually JC too.



We are just amazed at how God provided these things for us! They were not needs in our life, but they were a want and we are so thankful that not only does He take care of our needs but likes to bless us with things we want too!